Suppose two judges each classify a group of objects into one of several nominal categories. It has been observed in the literature that, for fixed observed agreement between the judges, Cohen’s kappa penalizes judges with similar marginals compared to judges who produce different marginals. This paper presents a formal proof of this phenomenon.

T heory suggests that Japanese politicians have weaker incentives than U.S. politicians to keep lower court judges independent. Accordingly, we hypothesize that Japanese lower court judges who defer on sensitive political questions will do better in their careers. To test this, we assemble several new data sets and measure the quality of the assignments received by about 400 judges after decidi...

In most states, trial judges’ sentencing is constrained by both ex ante constraints, in the form of mandatory and guideline sentences, and ex post review, often by the electorate. Might voters alter their evaluation of judges given the existence of boundaries on judicial discretion? Further, can legislators exploit this response? We present a model of ex ante and ex post control of judges given...

BACKGROUND intelligibility of phonological disorder. AIM to compare the intelligibility of phonological disorder analyzed by three distinct groups of judges. METHOD the research consisted of two samples: one sample was composed by 30 individuals with phonological disorder (assessed individuals) and the other sample was composed by the judges (speech-language therapists, laypeople and mother...